| |
THE BOMBS FELL JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT.
They tell you to prepare for such things. There are drills, kits, leaflets and posters, stern voices instructing you over the radio, but nothing can prepare the human mind for the sound of the world coming down. It is as if the devil has felled God. It is thunder from above and below. It is the very earth sundering. It is a single prolonged moment of chaos and destruction.
It is The End.
For months, since the retaliatory statements from their chancellor, we had lived in fear that this day would come, but as the days stretched on and the weeks went by, we did what people in fear will do and reached a sort of numb acceptance infused with a vein of hopeful doubt. If they were truly going to attack the city, then where were they? Wouldn’t they have struck already? What were they waiting for? Such frail hopes, however, were easily thwarted. The city had become lightless, blacked out so as not to make a target of itself, which seemed a rather pointless exercise when the enemy already knew where to strike. People walked blindly through the streets, narrowly avoided the cars and buses with their extinguished headlights, and stumbled on in a daze, confused at this new dark world in which they found themselves marooned.
The soldiers came with their portable shelters, little more than caged tables, cheap and shoddy forms of protection for those of us who did not have yards in which to build proper ones. They gave us gas masks and told us how to use them. Wear them always, they told us, and for a while we did, until our faces grew too hot and too sore, and the smell of the rubber gave us headaches. Mostly we sat around the rabbit hutch table and enjoyed the silence with tension making us as rigid as the chairs. And at night, we dutifully pulled down the black curtains and turned out all but the weakest of lights. In the feeble glow, we huddled together like the refugees we feared we’d one day become at the behest of an enemy to whom we had done nothing, and we listened. When we spoke, it was merely a whisper, as if the threat might not be limited to the skies above, as if night’s dark agents might be abroad, faces pressed to the windows, ears attuned to the slightest of sounds.
Sleep became a luxury few could afford. Often, there were sirens, howling up into the night like a stricken animal pleading for mercy. Instantly, we woke from restless slumber, muscles tightening, bodies subconsciously braced for impact, for death. The hair on the body rose; the heart began to race. The children, still sleepy headed, hurried into my arms, as if that could ever be adequate protection. My husband stood guard by the window, peeking through the tiny perforation in the black plastic. And always, there was nothing to report. By the time the sirens fell silent again, sleep had fled. Exhausted, we lay on the floor staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, thinking them nothing less than the blueprint of its destruction.
During the day, my husband worked. He was gone by dawn, drunk by six.
I sent the children to school where I knew they could learn nothing, washed their clothes, tried to keep up the pretense that this was still our home and not a brick prison waiting to collapse. It made my dutiful ministrations seem foolish. Bombs care little for scrubbed floors. To counter the malaise, I played scratched music on the tired Victrola, but found no reprieve in the rapturous heights of those arias. Instead, I was stricken by the profound and long delayed realization that, quite often, those women sung of war and tragedy, grief and loss. Thus, it was not joy I heard in their heavenly voices, but sorrow and anger. I felt no kinship with these strangers. Many of them had already died, the others away where windows did not need to be blackened and voices did not need to be muted. Safe.
For much of the day, I sat in silence and stared at the cracks above my head, the pattern that portended a terrible fate, and waited for my children to come home, my nose filled with the acrid stench of smoke from fires I couldn’t see.
✽✽✽
The night the bombs fell, the children were sleeping. We had moved them down into the basement, a closet sized room with a dirt floor and walls of hardened clay, the shoddy joists making it seem more like the gullet of some diseased animal than a sanctuary. It had been presented by the soldiers as a haven, a better bet, in any case, than the exposure of the main floor. Both my husband and I had resisted, and when we spoke of it amongst ourselves, the suggestion was instantly dismissed by the tone used to convey it as a possibility. Without knowing why, we did not want to send our children down there into the dirty dark. We had lived in the house for six years by then and had ventured into the basement only a handful of times, three of those without clear reason. Once, after falling asleep on the sofa, my husband had woken up to find himself standing in that tiny room in the pitch dark. Blind, he had screamed himself hoarse and clawed at the walls, the tendrils of roots brushing between his fingers, fearing he had somehow been buried alive. That Christmas, I stashed the gifts on the uppermost step of the rickety wooden stairs, knowing the children would never look there, and returned Christmas Eve to find them gone. Rats, my husband said, they’ll eat anything. We laid traps, and the traps disappeared too.
After that miserable Christmas, in which we’d been forced to gift our children cheap consolation prizes, we closed the stolid wooden door and bolted it shut. We did not discuss it. There was simply nothing down in that room we wanted or needed, hence, no cause to venture down there again. Of course, these were the naïve pre-war days. Once the sirens began their wailing on a nightly basis, and there were sounds of percussive strikes on the horizon, we stopped thinking of the unpleasantness of unused rooms, the silly fear of inexplicable things, and began making a rudimentary shelter in the basement. The room did not run the length of our house. It was a design decision that confounded my husband and nulled its usefulness as anything other than a hiding space. Not a basement, but a nook. Perhaps, he said, it had been abandoned before they’d had a chance to finish it. It was the only thing that made sense, and though the wooden braces supporting all four walls suggested the job had been completed to the architect’s satisfaction, I did not feel compelled to argue. By then, it hardly mattered.
April 20th, soldiers at the door instructed us to go down into the shelter and stay there. They were ashen faced, their eyes large and glassy, and did not seem possessed of the kind of bravery necessary to emerge victorious from the fray. It hardly instilled hope. Though bound to protect the citizens, many of them seemed more inclined to join them in their shelters or run far away from the danger. I could hardly blame them. With some blankets to protect against the frigid cold down below, and some bottles of water, a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese, we hurried into the basement and pulled the door shut behind us, the air sirens already yowling at our backs.
Only this time, they did not stop.
The bombs fell after midnight.
The sound was like all the engines of the world breaking down at once, or as if a locomotive had been dropped from the sky. The human ear is not designed to process such cacophony, and as one we winced, our hands clamped to the sides of our heads.
The roar made of a mockery of my husband’s whispered assurances, sucked the life from his words. As if he were an expert in such things, he quickly changed tactics, began to speculate loudly about which part of the town the bombs might have fallen. “That’s probably the barracks,” he said. “Or maybe the port.” Pointing out that those two locations were at opposite ends of the town would have accomplished nothing, so I stayed silent, listened to the drone of the aircraft, the whistling of the bombs, the pounding of the explosions. Vibrations carried through the dirt walls, shuddering our organic unit. The children were wrapped around us, their heads buried in the folds of our clothes, dampening them with their tears. They wept soundlessly. My husband jolted with each explosion, his voice high and reedy. I could smell the whiskey on his breath but did not, as was customary, resent him for it. When the world wants to kill you, a bottle is as good a place to hide as a basement.
“Jesus Christ in Heaven,” he said. “We forgot the gas masks. I should go get them.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” I told him, and refrained from adding that if a bomb fell close enough to do us harm, it wasn’t likely to be the gas that killed us.
More explosions, thunder through the walls, and dirt rained down from the ceiling. My daughter screamed into my stomach. My son buried his face deeper into my husband’s shirt. The dozen or so candles we had set around us in a crude semicircle fluttered, sending shadows carousing around the room.
“They might be getting closer,” my husband said. “But we’ll be okay. We’ll be safe down here.”
I looked at him, glad he was here with us, but struck by how unfamiliar he appeared in his fear. Previously I had only ever known him as a strong man, determined, capable but not altogether liberal with his emotions, particularly love. He was a good father and kind, but often I could see when he was too tired or unwilling to handle the demands of the job. Dependent on the light on a given day, I sometimes detected shreds of lost dreams in his eyes, the vestigial traces of squandered ambition and goals unattained. We did not marry for love, but we had found the threads of it over time, mostly through the children that had necessitated our formal union. And now, here, on what might be the end of the world, I found his fear humanized him in a way his love never could, maybe because there was no doubting its legitimacy.
Another violating thrust as another bomb penetrated the city. More dirt rained on our heads. One of the candles went out. The room shook, and I held my daughter tighter to my chest. Her fingers were claws, nails drawing blood from my sides. I did not tell her to ease off, would have let her crawl inside me if it meant she’d be safe.
“We’ll be okay,” my husband said again. “We’ll be okay.”
I did not believe him. He had ceased his speculation about the location of the strikes, because they were getting closer, the last sounding as if it had hit a few streets away to the east. I looked away from him, the evident fear on his face only exacerbating my own, and straight ahead into the dark beyond the small arc of candles. There, I saw a pale smudge of something illuminated in the guttering flame, like a crooked stripe of paint on the opposite wall. Candle-shadow animated it, made it twist in on itself like a dash of milk in water. Perhaps the wall was crumbling. It filled me with dread that instead of the quick mercy of death from a sudden explosion, we might instead slowly die from suffocation as the walls gave way and the ceiling came down, choking us with dirt.
Further movement, this time closer to the floor, nearer the candles. My labored imagination and the poor light told me it was a spider, though I had never seen one quite so large. The splintered nails at the tips of its feet as it approached the flame told me I had been foolish in seeing it as anything other than a gnarled hand. My spine went rigid with shock, even as I reminded myself that now, under the existential stress of potential annihilation, I was likely to see and imagine anything from hands to enemy soldiers materializing from those walls.
“All right now,” my husband said, hushing the anguish from our son. “Everything will be—”
The bomb that hit was not direct, as I would discover later. It hit the houses across the street from us, leveling most of that row, but the impact blew out our windows and most of the front wall, turned our furniture to splinters and collapsed the ceiling. Everything on the second floor tumbled down into the first, caving in the rabbit hutch the soldiers had assured would protect us in the event of such a calamity. None of the protective measures would have saved us, and I found myself thinking back to the reaction from one of the soldiers, little more than a boy, who had shaken his head at the mention of us remaining in our homes. “Unless you have an exterior shelter, it’s better to leave than take the chance,” he’d said. “Otherwise it’ll be like trying to stop a tank with an umbrella.” But this was our home. We could not afford to leave the city even if we’d had someplace else to go. And always that nagging doubt that the country was overreacting to verbal threats that would yield no physical retaliation. We were stubborn, and we stayed, held in place by some atavistic notion that we were merely caught in a dream from which we would inevitably awake before it could hurt us.
As the house above us fell, a cascade of dirt from the basement ceiling buried us from the waist down. The wall at my back crumbled, not completely, but enough so that I found myself reclined into a hollow, my mouth full of roots. Roots that seemed to move, fumbling like worms against my cheeks and eyes and between my lips, though that was most likely my own frantic attempt to be free of the concavity. Through the fall of dirt, I saw my husband bend over and clutch our son harder, and despite the madness, I felt a swell of love and gratitude for him, made myself a solemn promise to whomever might have the power to grant salvation, that if I survived, I would try to love him more, even if he was not emotionally capable of reciprocity.
I grabbed onto my daughter’s frail quivering shoulders and screamed in anguished protest at the war, at the insanity of it all, and tasted coarse dry dirt on my tongue and in my throat. Why? I raged. Why us when we had done nothing to anyone but live our lives in a country that had challenged another? We were not the authority, the instigators. We were not the antagonists, but the spectators, the people in other rooms who only heard the mumblings of discontent through the walls. Why should we die? A lifetime of struggling, of trying to get by, undone in a heartbeat as a punctuation mark to a disagreement among strangers.
The hail of dirt subsided; the rumbling ceased. Other than the occasional sound of something shifting in the remains of the rooms above, it was quiet. My ears rang. It would be some time before I could hear properly again.
Only a single candle had endured the fall of dirt and dust. It guttered, appeared to die, then returned to cast its meager light through the haze. And in that feeble light, I saw a woman sitting against the opposite wall. I gave an involuntary gasp. She was no more than six feet away, but the light and the dust rendered her indistinct. Her crooked posture suggested injury, her eyes and mouth mere black thumbprints of shadow in the dirty gray egg of her face. I had the impression of an old print dress swaddling an oddly shaped body. She was sitting, her feet pointing toward the stairs. One foot was upside down, the toes buried in the floor. Her head faced in the opposite direction, turned slightly away from us. There were strange folds in the flesh of her neck. The bomb must have twisted her and flung her across the street and down here with us.
Dirty air rushed into the room from the holes in the ceiling.
I alerted my husband. It took him some time to hear me. When he looked at me, I saw that there was a nasty gash running from between his eyes up into his hairline. It was bleeding furiously down onto his shirt. He blinked rapidly and smiled at me with dirt-darkened teeth. “We’re going...to be...okay,” he said, and looked down at our son. The boy, lying half in the dirt, looked up at him, his eyes watery with panic.
I looked back into the dark.
The woman had moved and now her face and upper body were facing the wall. Her lower body had not changed position. Her feet were still pointed toward the stairs. But now her arms were raised, broken hands hanging loosely at shoulder height as if she were attempting some strange interpretation of an Egyptian dance. From the wall around her, more dirt tumbled as other hands began to worm their way through into the basement.
Rescuers? I wondered, and then I was being shaken violently enough to make my teeth clack together. Confused, I looked at my husband. He was very close and snarling at me. He must have gone mad. He was shaking me, then shoving me, then pulling our daughter out of my arms. Her nails dragged more furrows in my flesh. She was not moving. Her mouth was open and full of dirt. Wet warmth trickled from my nose. I brought a hand up to probe it and saw that I was holding the knife I had brought to cut the bread.
I mouthed questions into the darkness. No one answered.
I looked to the lady sitting by the far wall and saw that she had moved again. She was kneeling before me now, weaving slightly, using her weight to force her broken neck to bring her head around to where she needed it. Trying to face me.
My husband screamed in anguish. I dared not look. He was gesticulating wildly above the inert body of our daughter.
With a grunt, the old lady’s head swiveled around to regard me, allowing me to see that her labors had been in vain. Somebody had stitched her eyes shut with black shoelaces. Her mouth too, but not tightly enough to deny her a smile.
My husband lunged at me, his hands hooked into claws. I saw that he was screaming but heard nothing but the ringing in my own ears and the very faint sound of the old lady’s laughter.
Over her shoulder as my husband’s hands found my throat, I saw that our son had crawled into the corner away from the chaos. From the dirt wall, a multitude of hands reached for him like plants drawn to the light.
“If you wish to see them, close your eyes,” said the old woman.
I did as she requested, imagined what it would feel like to never have to open them again, and felt the old lady’s hand guide my own, guide the knife, up and toward my husband’s neck.
The next bomb reduced the house to rubble.
✽✽✽
The shelling continued for three more days.
The basement withstood it all, only coming down at the behest of the rescuers’ picks and shovels.
By that time, I had gone quite mad with grief and horror and sorrow. They took me to a mobile hospital and treated my injuries, most of which were superficial. In soothing tones, people—whether doctors, soldiers, or something else, I’ll never know—informed me that my husband and two children had yet to be found. They advised me not to give up hope. Quite the contrary, they said. If the bodies were not in the basement, then it was quite likely they’d escaped and would find their way home in due course. But these people know nothing of errant Christmas presents and rat traps, of broken bodied old women with stitched up eyes, and of pale clambering hands bursting from the walls. Despite the authority in their voices, they are quite ignorant indeed.
They released me a week later, and I walked through a metropolis of debris, of fire and smoke, of pain and misery, of fear and confusion, to find my home. I missed it twice and had to backtrack. Home is harder to find when its face has been removed. Once I located the ruin in which I had married and raised my children, some kindly men assisted me in clearing some of the rubble that had fallen since my rescue, exposing for me the now exposed basement. I thanked them, dismissed their advice to stay clear, and clambered my way into the remains of that square of dirt. The walls were gone. Only the floor remained. The candle was there too, and I lit it with one of the three items I had taken from the hospital.
In the dirt, I sat and waited until the street and the city fell silent.
The moon rose high above my ruin, casting a patchwork of shadows on my face as the old woman’s voice echoed through the feverish chambers of desperate memory.
“If you wish to see them, close your eyes.”
From my pocket, I produced the other two items I had brought: a needle and some black thread.
She whispered to me of history, and of the future, and of holes blown in the earth by uneducated men, of broken prisons and freedom, and of old ones come again. She whispered to me of pain.
While I worked, and when it was time, the old lady’s hand grew like a weed from the bloodied dirt before me and pinched out the candle flame.
By then, I didn’t need the light.
